Building a Regime From a Kit Eve Tushnet • Kids, don’t try this at home October 2000

Anarcho-capitalism sounds exotic, trippy, even weirder than voting for
Harry Browne for President. But some of the worst principles on which it
is based flourish in your poli sci classes and in the everyday conversation
of your friends. To refute anarcho-capitalism from stem to stern would
take more than an article in the YFP, so this article will simply suggest
three reasons to be leery of both the extreme theory and the commonplace
underlying principles.

The Phantom Menace First off, anarcho-capitalism is science fiction. It posits a world
that has never been, for men who have never lived. The theorists sit in
their university offices or dorm rooms and come up with the grooviest regime
they can imagine, with no reference to existing political conditions.

If men had no patriotism and only a fairly minimal amount of viciousness—and
if we were making our polity from scratch—this might work. But the “build
a society from materials you find at home” approach is unconvincing. It
echoes the basic rationalist error: the idea that smart people don’t need
to look to history for more than cursory guidance. This speculative, subjunctive-tense
approach to political philosophy tends to assume that the law of unintended
consequences will not warp the actions of the anarcho-capitalist’s protection
agencies to the same degree that it warps the actions of the State. The
law of unintended consequences operates with more force the farther into
the future we try to theorize; since anarcho-capitalists must speak of
what will happen centuries from now, they can tell us virtually nothing
of what their society might look like.

Anarcho-capitalists share this tendency with almost every political
philosopher since the Enlightenment—Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and the gang.
The worst modern offender is probably campus hero John Rawls, who asked
us to imagine a world “behind the veil of ignorance” where men judged without
reference to their loves, their ethics, or the understanding they had gained
through experience. Robert Nozick’s Just-So Story of how the State might
have been created justly (but wasn’t) is another prominent example of sci-fi
political theory. All these thinkers take their own utopias first and attempt
to force the existing polities into those molds, rather than asking, “Is
my country so terribly broken that the disruption caused by radical reform
has become necessary?” It’s always easier to answer “yes”; it’s a lot harder
to offer a reliable promise of something better. Anarchists may show that
a better world under their system is imaginable, but not that likely.

Style Over Substance Thoughtful anarcho-capitalists, like David
Barnes and Katherine Mangu-Ward
agree that anarcho-capitalists can’t tell us what their world would look
like. They claim that a government-free world would necessarily be richer,
kinder, happier, and safer than our own, because government turns everything
it touches into garbage. But in some areas, when the government gets out,
things get better — welfare and postal services come to mind. In other
areas — say, prostitution or child abuse — deregulation has not promoted
right action. The anarchist asserts that the content of a regime will be
good because the form is good, the content bad because all governments
are bad. There can be no legitimate governments – none that the anarchist
is willing to let alone, on the theory that his guesses about the future
may turn out to be unjustified. The anarchist behaves like many moder political
thinkers, who can imagine no legitimate government without the forms of
democracy.

They make their best case for democracy as the best form of government
(or even, in Churchill’s more acute phrasing, “The worst form of government,
except for all the others”), and from then on we must judge all democracies
(no matter how vicious) preferable to all non-democracies (no matter how
just). As Leo Strauss pointed out in Natural Right and History,
this way of thinking cannot distinguish between kingship and tyranny, aristocracy
and oligarchy, democracy and mob rule.

Throw Mama from the Train Some anarcho-capitalists come to their conclusion because they believe
that coercion is the ultimate injustice, that force necessarily deforms
human relations. But this claim runs into trouble when it tries to encompass
our first experiences of coercion—our relation to our parents. In the family,
coercion and loyalty intertwine. We understand that if children are left
entirely to their own devices, they are pretty unlikely to lead good or
fulfilling lives. So we coerce them into acting right.

The knee-jerk response to this fact is to ask, “So you think the government
should be our parent?” No... sigh... I don’t. But there are only a few
ways of distinguishing children from adults for the purposes of political
theory, and all present problems for the anarcho-capitalist. (It should
also disturb any theorists—liberals and statists as well as anarcho-capitalists—if
their theory requires them to regard the family as a necessary evil.)

It could be that we can coerce children because they are not yet rational.
This option bases political freedom on one of the most difficult questions
of philosophy: What is rational? There really isn’t space here to discuss
that little problem. But at least we can say that political freedom should
extend to non-rational decisions and decision makers, so this distinction
is insufficient.

Or maybe we can coerce children because the familial relation is natural.
This option is not available to most modern political theorists, since
they have ditched the notion of natural law. Moreover, it’s not the easiest
task in the world to prove that coercion by non-relatives is unnatural.

This doesn’t mean that every virtue must be legislated. Most simply
can’t be. (Honesty, integrity, chastity, kindness...) Others can’t be legislated
without destroying our privacy and tempting government agents into tyranny.
Libertarians’ emphasis on freedom and privacy is a great deterrent to government
overreaching. But the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend; the
enemy of the managerial state and the dictatorship of virtue is not necessarily
the friend of justice, mercy or loyalty.

One for the Road The final point is practical. It seems evident that an anarcho-capitalist
world would offer enormous incentives for competing protection agencies
to cater to the strongest and richest. Anarcho-capitalists typically shrug
and change the subject when asked how those who can’t make contracts (children,
the mentally retarded, the insane, people who have violated the rights
of others and been snatched and imprisoned by their protection agencies)
or who would be easily tricked (folks who aren’t as bright as most Yale
undergrads) would be protected.

Again, these points are not intended as a complete refutation. They
are more of a challenge, not just to anarcho-capitalists, but to the majority
of Yale students and political science professors who hold views that entangle
them in similar problems.

—Eve Tushnet, MC ‘00, is a former Editor-in-Chief of the YFP.

The
Yale Free Press is published by students ofYale University.

Yale University
is not responsible for its

contents. By
the same

token, The
Yale Free Press is not responsible for the contents of Yale